Marking Place, Making History: the Shifting Narrative Structures of the Codex Xolotl Hayley Woodward After the conquest of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in tively combines geographic space with historical narrative.3 1521, neither the burgeoning Viceroyalty of New Spain nor This conclusion is based on a close analysis of the first page of the newly supplanted mendicant orders could stifle pre- the codex, which emphasizes place and movement through Hispanic modes of artistic representation in the early colonial the land and allots more detail to the topographic features period. While only a number of Aztec books or works on of the landscape compared to the other pages (Figure 1). paper survived the Spanish conquest (none of which derive However, a critical analysis of all ten pages of the document from the Valley of Mexico, the navel of the Aztec Empire), is forced to acknowledge its shifting narrative structures as the local artists created hundreds of books, manuscripts, and codex progresses through time. A study of the changes and maps in the sixteenth century.1 Amidst this broad corpus of continuities in the natural landscape throughout the pages Nahua manuscripts (Nahua referring to those who spoke of the Xolotl reveals how the indigenous artist strategically Nahuatl, the indigenous language of Central Mexico) painted uses (and at times omits) place to express historical narrative. after the conquest is an exceptional example of pre-Hispanic The classification of “historical narrative” implies that style and subject matter: the Codex Xolotl.2 This document the depicted history is not only a story with historical un- is brimming with chronologically-organized historical, ge- derpinnings, but a story with a specific function and agenda. nealogical, and martial information of the Chichimecs, a Thus, each page strategically structured its narrative, morph- nomadic group who entered and ultimately settled in the ing the history into the story its creators wished to convey. eastern Valley of Mexico, founding one of the great cities By studying the document through this lens—as one that on the shores of the lake, Texcoco. Upon their settlement covers centuries of political and social transition in Central into Texcoco, the Chichimec ethnic group acculturated and Mexico through a subtle multiplicity of formats—one can transformed into the Texcocans. understand how the narrative both complies with and sup- Place, event, and time are threaded together as a narra- presses the geography it inhabits, creating a specific story tive story in the Codex Xolotl. This document projects a view for a specific people. of the Valley of Mexico in nine of its ten pages; upon this The date of the Codex Xolotl does not survive in the screen of landscape, events take place. Notations of time ac- historical record. While some (including Fernando de Alva company individual scenes, providing a temporal framework Ixtlilxochitl, Lorenzo Boturini Benaduci, and Joseph Marius to guide the reader through the evolving story taking place Alexis Aubin) have identified the Xolotl as a pre-Hispanic upon the paper’s surface. Strings of footprints connect the manuscript, subtle pictorial conventions reveal that the docu- places and personages, denoting movement and sequential ment’s tlacuiloque (or indigenous artist-scribes) were exposed order of movement across the region. to European stylistic conventions.4 For instance, banners are Past scholarship rightly treats the Codex Xolotl as a prime depicted as curved, two-pronged pennants, while animate example of a cartographic history, meaning the codex effec- faces sit within the middle of the sun glyphs, both indices of I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Elizabeth Hill Boone, for her 3 Barbara Mundy, “Mesoamerican Cartography,” in The History of Car- guidance throughout the evolution of this paper and my related the- tography Vol. 2, Book 3, ed. David Woodward and G. Malcolm Lewis sis project. I also thank Dr. Michael Plante and Dr. Adrian Anagnost (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 205-207; for their helpful comments in the developmental stage of this paper. and Elizabeth Hill Boone, Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories Finally, many thanks are due to the faculty and organizers of the 34th of the Aztecs and Mixtecs (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2000), Art History Graduate Symposium at Florida State University for their 79-81. warm hospitality. 4 Walter Lehmann, Methods and Results in Mexican Research, trans. 1 Elizabeth Hill Boone, “Pictorial Documents and Visual Thinking in Post- Seymour de Ricci (Paris: H. Clarke, 1909), 13; Charles E. Dibble, conquest Mexico,” in Native Traditions in the Preconquest World, ed. Códice Xolotl, 2 vol. (1951; repr., Mexico: Universidad Nacional Elizabeth Hill Boone and Tom Cummins (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Autónoma de México, 1980), 11-12; Donald Robertson, Mexican Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1992), 149. Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959), 143; and Eduardo Douglas, In the Palace of 2 The ten pages of the Codex Xolotl are labeled Fonds Mexicain 1-10, Nezahualcoyotl: Painting Manuscripts, Writing the Pre-Hispanic Past in and are currently held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Early Colonial Period Tetzcoco, Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2010), 25. ATHANOR XXXV HAYLEY WOODWARD European artistic influences upon the tlacuiloque, or ruling function as toponyms, or formalized symbols of place. The class of Texcoco. The Xolotl likely responded to the colonial conventional signs are composed of a nominal glyph attached concerns of early 1540s Texcoco, based on its similarities in to a topographical feature, evinced in the glyphic representa- subject matter to the Mapa Tlotzin and the Mapa Quinatzin, tion of Chapultepec, comprised of a grasshopper (chapul-) two works on paper deriving from Texcoco that have clear sitting atop a hill glyph (tepec) (Figure 2). Serving to spatially dates associated with their creation (1541 for the Tlotzin, relate the places to one another by fixing the toponyms in and 1542-1543 for the Quinatzin).5 their approximately correct location in physical space, the The Xolotl visually expresses events from the thirteenth artist does not arbitrarily situate the place signs onto the century to its denouement in 1431, leaving a lacuna of over page. Instead, the toponyms possess geographic significance. 100 years between the end of the narrative and its proposed Thus, there is a cartographic correlation between the moment of creation. This gap demonstrates that the Xolotl is Xolotl and geographic reality. The bumpy eastern mountain likely a copy of a single pre-Hispanic document or a pool of range separates the flat lakeshore region from the polities to different indigenous documents from Texcoco consolidated the east of the range, culminating in the great volcanoes to into the Xolotl.6 These predecessor documents were likely the south. The outline of the four lakes approximately mimics created directly after the events represented in the codex the lake system’s true shoreline boundaries, although there came to completion, to be preserved and passed down by is a degree of stylization between the codex’s pages (Figure the tlacuiloque. The assumption of pre-Hispanic predeces- 3). At times, the Xolotl takes liberties from spatial reality, sors and sources for the Xolotl accommodates the confluence particularly in the arrangement of the boundary toponyms of minor European visual conventions with the document’s that hug the margins of the Xolotl’s first page, which eschew overall organization, which undoubtedly utilizes a uniquely geographic reality in order to condense the signs into the indigenous mode of presenting history.7 map’s vantage point.8 Thus, this document functions as a As previously mentioned, the early colonial order saw close suggestion of the Valley of Mexico’s geography to the a proliferation in indigenous-made visual documents in a reader, a projected screen of landscape upon which narra- moment of political tension between the nascent colonial tive occurs. bureaucracy and the surviving indigenous royal dynasties, Xolotl, the leader of the Chichimecs and namesake of especially in Xolotl’s place of creation, Texcoco. These docu- the codex, and Nopaltzin reappear throughout the first page, ments served as a mode of visually delineating the ancient both wearing textured capes of animal hair, knotted at the history of the indigenous ruling class, thereby reinforcing neck connected by indigenous styled footprints (Figure 4). their legitimacy within the colonial order. While the codex Affixed to their bodies are their identifying name glyphs: for lacks a firm historical context of its date and commissioner, Xolotl a dog head in profile, and for Nopaltzin a nopal cactus. a visual analysis of the codex’s narrative structures hints at The reoccurring figures are linked by a string of footprints, the reason for the document’s creation as a means of rep- indicators of their movement across the landscape. They resenting the collective memory and ancient lineage of the begin in the lower left corner of the valley, moving east pass- Texcocan rulers within the fluctuating colonial order. The ing through various places and toward ancient ruins, which comparative study of the landscape outlined in this paper they observe and discuss. The two then separate, Nopaltzin elucidates and supports this assertion. surveying the eastern expanse of land between the lakes and The Xolotl’s narrative is cast across ten sheets of native the mountain range, while the leader Xolotl returns west, paper, each painted on one side, all but one depicting a establishing a community kingdom called Tenayuca. He projection of Central Mexico. Oriented to the east, four concludes his journey by circumambulating the margins of then-extant lakes of the Valley of Mexico stretch horizontally the plan as an act of ritual exploration and understanding of across the lower registers of the pages (Xaltocan, Texcoco, the land.9 Thus, the landscape allows for a sequential series Xochimilco, and Chalco from left to right).